


Star-Crossed

by miceenscene



Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Mystery, Pre-Canon, Rating May Change, The Helmet Stays On, Touch-Starved Din Djarin
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 21:20:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29907222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miceenscene/pseuds/miceenscene
Summary: The Way was not supposed to be a solitary one. People, house, clan. And when all else failed, your Match. “Fits like a Mandalorian Match” was the old saying. Though it wasn’t so long ago that it stopped making sense.But what's a lost Match to a man like Din Djarin?You can never have too many soulmate AU's, right?
Relationships: Din Djarin & Original Female Character(s), Din Djarin/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	Star-Crossed

**Author's Note:**

> I'm doing a looser prose style as I wanted to actually get through this whole idea without another two-year project on my hands. So far, I'd say it's going well. Hopefully you'll agree. :) <3, Mice

Din Djarin has been alone for a very long time.

And somewhere along in being alone, he decided he liked it. He _preferred_ it. 

People were pushy. Demanding. Rude.

They took one look at his armor and assumed the man underneath.

At least that’s what he decided was the reason he preferred solitude.

There was an unacknowledged truth, however, that perhaps choosing to prefer loneliness dulled its edge ever so slightly. Just enough to be ignorable most nights.

But some nights, deep in the slip of hyperspace, when it was just him in his tiny bunk on The _Razor Crest_ , it wasn’t ignorable. It sat high in his chest, occupying the space between his lungs, filling it with an _emptiness_ so big it threatened to squeeze the breath out to make room.

On nights like that, the helmet usually went back on.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

The Way was not supposed to be a solitary one. 

People, house, clan. 

And when all else failed, your Match.

“Fits like a Mandalorian Match” was the old saying. Though it wasn’t so long ago that it stopped making sense.

So many lamentable things were lost in the Great Purge. 

The beskar, their homeworld… 

Lose enough people, break enough pairs, does it even matter if the Matches still exist? 

Or don’t, as the case might be.

So much of what the Mandalorians once had is lost. What’s one more thing?

What’s a lost Match to a man like Din Djarin?

He knew his stars. The constellation that outlined the path of his life. 

Every Mandalorian had one.

The elders had been very keen to identify his when he first was found. They did eventually.

 _Tal’onidir._ Blood struggle.

Or ‘blood, sweat, and tears’ as the Alderaanians would have said.

Though in the time before the Purge, both halves of a Match’s stars would have been consulted for a clearer picture. 

But all he had was his half. All most everyone had was their half.

Very few of the old myths still applied in a galaxy barely free of an Imperial yoke. But even Din had to admit that his stars felt more right than he wanted them to be.

Life was a constant struggle.

Struggle to survive, struggle to continue, struggle to carve out some semblance of contentment with his lot.

He felt he was doing as well as any could.

And then, out of the clear night sky, everything changed.

He was in his ship when he first noticed something off. 

Four fresh pucks from Karga, plotting the most fuel-efficient map between his quarries and Nevarro. When he found himself putting in coordinates for Tatooine.

None of the quarries were on Tatooine this time. He stopped, shook his head, and punched in for Jakku. 

Desert planets were bound to blur together. 

He brushed it off, deciding to get as much sleep as he could in hyperspace.

It was a helmet-on kind of sleep, though.

It came up again as he was leaving Corellia. 

He’d actually locked in the coordinates that time and was halfway through atmo before he noticed.

And then it was when he set foot back on Nevarro, four carbonite platters ready for delivery later, that he felt it again. 

He didn’t _want_ to be here. 

But it was in the middle of Karga offering up new pucks when Din really damned himself.

“Do you have any on Tatooine?” slipped out before he could stop it.

Karga did. Just the one, and a risky venture at that. A Captain in one of the Hutts palaces.

Din took it. He wasn’t even sure _why_ he took it, but it was too late. He was half-way to the ship when he realized he hadn’t taken any other bounties.

Still some part of him unclenched as he finally made the jump to hyperspace.

He’d thought that this odd urge would evaporate as he landed.

It didn’t.

 _That way,_ it said, gesturing metaphorically for the Dune Sea.

Even if his quarry was technically that direction, this whole journey seemed foolish. And he might have given up if not for that old saying his Armorer was so fond of,

‘Instincts can be misled, but they never lie.’

Peli was her usual self--some combination of persnickety and jovial that landed right in charming. But she did lend a speeder bike.

Finally Din was off, racing through the searing sands.

It was less than a day’s journey, however, when he felt the urge again.

_Stop ._

He did, scoping all around him, trying to figure out how this gulley between dunes was different from all the others.

Pulling out his pocket scope, gave him a clue. The Hutt palace warbled in the far distance. Now just to figure out how to get inside, kill and/or remove one of the better trained guards without alerting the whole palace.

He watched the palace for the rest of the evening, noting guard rotations, possible alternate entrances.

After the suns set, things began to get a little tense

Dark was the obvious option for trying a covert entrance to the compound. But the urge was rather adamant.

_Wait ._

“Wait for _what_?” he asked an empty desert before immediately feeling foolish

His answer came a few hours before sunrise.

A small barge left the palace, floating just a hundred yards north of him. There weren’t many people on board. A few guards, perhaps a slave--

And his quarry.

Well. Rarely did events turn out so damn convenient.

_Follow ._

Even better.

Back on the speeder bike, he kept pace with the barge, keeping a few dunes between them. Trying to log as much information as he could before striking.

Four guards. One slave. One quarry. No one appeared to be below deck. This wouldn’t be too difficult.

Then the slave kicked one of the guards off the barge.

Another immediately fired a shot at the slave, only to be gruffly stopped by the quarry with the flat of an axe blade. 

Din watched on thermal as the quarry pulled something out of his jacket, and then the slave dropped.

An armor piercing scream echoed through the desert, settling high in his chest and _constricting_.

_Now._

Speeder bike surged forward, and one shot with his grappling cable, he managed to land feet first on the side of the barge.

It dipped under his added weight. One guard leaning over to inspect and getting a blaster shot between the eyes for his trouble.

Two more leaned over, but Din ran along the side to get momentum and swing himself up on deck.

The quarry bum-rushed him, axe out. Beskar took most of the brunt, and Din knocked him back, nearly off the side but he gripped the railing, sending a small device skittering to the deck floor.

The slave stopped screaming and that tightness in his chest immediately relaxed, though it didn't evaporate.

_Danger ._

Yes, obviously.

Din shot one guard as the slave, a human woman in some sort of flowy very impractical clothing, got to her feet and knocked another one off into the sand.

“Duck,” he yelled to her, before shooting the last guard behind her, as she dropped to the deck.

The quarry got back on deck and instead of going after Din, or the woman, he ran for the device near the front of the ship.

“ _NOOO–”_ the woman yelled as Din ran after the quarry. But the quarry arrived first, smashing the butt of his axe into the device and destroying it.

Her cry cut off abruptly, but Din focused on getting a single shot to the back of the quarry’s head first. He succeeded.

The post-battle quiet rushed in, cut only by the sound of the barge motor still going and his own breathing. 

_Save ._

He turned back to examine The Woman, who was prone on the deck, not moving. The tightness returned.

Civilian casualties were… an unfortunate reality. He did his very best to avoid them whenever possible. But there had been instances before.

Though those times didn’t make his hands shake as he turned on thermal again.

The shake ebbed as he confirmed she was still alive. Just unconscious. A breath cut out of him.

 _Save ,_ the urge repeated _._

Well, he couldn’t fly a stolen Hutt barge as the way back to Mos Eisley. Hopefully the speeder bike was where he left it. 

It was. Though it wasn’t meant to hold three people. The quarry was strapped to the back like so much cargo, and since The Woman didn’t seem to be waking anytime soon, he had no choice but to hold her.

It was more awkward than anything else, her head flopped on his pauldron and her perfume filling his nose

He didn’t know the scent, but it was rich and sweet, and lingered in the back of his throat

They arrived at Mos Eisley as the suns broke free of the horizon. 

Peli gave him a strange look when he asked for bolt cutters, but even if the woman was unconscious, Din wasn’t going to leave that collar on her.

Though now came the most important question: what was he going to do with her? 

She seemed stable, no wounds that he’d noticed at all. Though she still hadn’t regained consciousness.

It was probably a fairly safe bet that an escaped slave wouldn’t want to stay planetside.

And if she did, he’d bring her right back after getting paid.

He tucked her into the only bed on The _Razor Crest_ –though bed was a generous definition– and found every blanket to drape on top of her. Space was cold and the fabric of her dress was nearly translucent.

_Save ._

“I’m trying,” he muttered, heading to the cockpit for take off.

The Woman didn’t wake up before Nevarro.

Two and a half full days unconscious was not a good sign. Even for someone like him.

Thermal said she wasn’t running a temperature. At the end of the second day, he gave her a bacta shot for good measure. 

Nothing changed.

_Fix._

For all the time he spent on Nevarro, Din realized very quickly that he actually knew precious little outside of the covert. Which left him with Karga as his only source of guidance.

“Is there a hospital here? Or a doctor?” he asked, as soon as money had changed hands.

“Are you hurt, Mando?” Karga gave him a once over, as if checking for missing limbs.

“Not for me.”

“Well, we do have a clinic. But it’s run by a healing droid.”

“ _No droids_ ,” Din responded with a fervency usually reserved for his ship.

Karga held up his hands in surrender. “Then I’m afraid you’re out of luck.”

_Fix._

Resisting the urge to sigh, Din asked, “Where’s the clinic?”

A Mandalorian carrying a blanketed bundle the size of a grown woman though the marketplace was bound to get a few strange looks.

Luckily, there wasn’t a line at the clinic.

Unluckily, the droid was still there.

The Woman looked concerningly pale on the table as the droid ran scan after scan. Her hair, dark and curly, didn’t shine like it had under the Tatooine double sun rise. It was limp and lifeless. 

Like her.

_Fix!_

“How many more scans are you going to run??” Din snapped.

The droid was unfazed, finished its test before turning to face him.

“I have found the problem.” A projection appeared of The Woman’s head in profile. A small white square at the base of her skull. “She appears to have a chip implanted between her third and fourth cervical vertebrae.”

“Removing that will fix her?”

“All signs point to this being the root of the problem.”

“Can you remove it here?”

“Yes, but you cannot be present for the procedure.”

Though the idea of trusting her care into the hands of a droid made his palms itch, Din nodded.

He was allowed a moment to say good-bye, which felt both strange as he didn’t even know her name and yet not long enough all at the same time.

He touched a gloved hand to her shoulder, promising that this would fix it.

Though he wasn’t sure _who_ he was promising that too.

A full hour crawled by as Din waited in the dingy clinic waiting room. The urge very insistent

_Fix. Return. Fix. Return._

He was about ready to go ask what was taking so long again when the droid returned.

“The procedure was a success. She may be confused for a few days. But her mind will heal with time. Your wife is sleeping now, but can leave by the end of the day. ”

Side-stepping the presumption, he asked, “Do you have the chip?”

“Yes. Would you like to keep it?”

“Yes.” Mainly to find out where it came from in the first place. Implanted chips were rare and few, if any, were legal. Especially not ones capable of this sort of… control.

Given that The Woman was still sleeping, Din decided to take the chip to get some answers.

The urge was not happy.

_Return. Return. Return._

But really, when she woke, the droid's face would be more expressive than his own.

From this side of the city, he took the southern entrance to the covert. 

There was a tension shift as soon as he stepped down into the subterranean tunnels. The oddity of a Mandalorian was stripped away, thankfully.

At the heart of the covert was the armory and more importantly the Armorer. He sat before her forge and waited to be addressed.

“I see no defects in your armor,” she said, not stopping her smelting.

“I seek answers, not repairs.”

“Answers to what?”

He placed the chip down. She picked it up to examine it silently before setting it back down and returning to her work.

“Where did you find this?”

“Tatooine. Inside a slave from a Hutt palace.”

“Is the slave alive?”

“Yes.”

“They may provide more answers than I can.”

“She’s not conscious,” he explained, taking the chip back. “And–”

The Armorer waited for him to continue.

“I was… led to her.”

“How?”

He paused for a long moment, trying to find a way to explain. “Instinct.”

 _Danger ,_ the urge suddenly said _._

A slight commotion out in the hall behind him interrupted their conversation. Raised voices echoed down stone walls.

The Armorer’s comm link came to life. “Outsider at the southern entrance.”

_Danger! Go._

Din was up on his feet before he made the choice to do so. And he was halfway down the hall by the time he’d realized he’d left.

A few other Mandalorians were also moving to the southern entrance, back up if there was an invading force.

_Danger! Danger!_

The urge pulled him into a sprint for the last corner.

Coming around it, something high in his chest resounded in fear.

The Woman was standing at the end of the hall, dressed in his dark shirt he’d pulled over her dress before taking her to the clinic, with at least six Mandalorian blasters pointed at her.

_Save!_

“STOP. WAIT.” Din ran down towards the stand off. “DON’T SHOOT.”

A few blasters turned his direction before their owners saw who he was. He could hear quite a few more Mandalorians also approaching from behind.

The Woman, however, did not seem bothered by the guns or the platoon of armored warriors surrounding her. She calmly walked forward, gaze focused somewhere ahead of her.

On him. 

_Return ._

Her eyes were a soft grey, yet distant. Foggy.

Din drifted towards her. The urge now palpable under his skin.

_Return ._

However, it was only when she reached out and took one gloved hand in hers that it finally relaxed, disappeared.

“Outsiders are not permitted inside the covert,” one of the guards snapped.

“She’s not an outsider,” the Armorer replied. 

Her voice seemed very far away to Din who felt it was more important to study this woman’s face than listen. 

“She’s a Match.”

That cut through the gentle reverie of grey eyes.

A _what?_

**Author's Note:**

> Ohhhh I've fallen hard for the tin-can man. Be sure to share your thoughts below, or find me on tumblr: [miceenscene](https://miceenscene.tumblr.com/). <3, Mice


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